Killing the Hangman James Pattillo 9780979755286 Books
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March, 1939. Stefan Mrak escorts a planeload of intelligence files from Prague to London. Before he can return, the Germans occupy Czechoslovakia, stranding Stefan in London. Stefan volunteers to parachute back into Prague as part of a sabotage team, hoping to find Marta, his wife, and help her escape to a neutral country. His application is rejected, because Stefan is a tin soldier. He wears a uniform, but he works at a desk and lacks the inner toughness needed for clandestine operations in an occupied country.
Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the Hangman,’ is head of the Sicherheitsdienst and Gestapo, and schemes to become Führer if Hitler dies. When Poland surrenders, Heydrich sees a chance to move up in the Nazi hierarchy. For ten weeks he’s in constant motion -- exhorting, directing, ordering, living on Benzedrine and coffee. Factory managers, editors, and intellectuals are rounded up and shot by the thousands. Heydrich’s reward is the governorship of Czechoslovakia – which he intends to treat just like Poland.
Heydrich’s draconian measures drive Czech Intelligence to train a team to assassinate him, but one member breaks a leg just days before the parachute drop. A German-speaking officer is urgently needed to replace the injured man. The choice falls on Stefan, who must overcome his nature and do what’s required to save Marta, himself, and his country.
Killing the Hangman James Pattillo 9780979755286 Books
‘Killing the Hangman’ is really three books in one. It’s a vivid dramatization of actual historical events, it’s an emotionally satisfying love story, and, most importantly, it’s a gripping suspense novel, set in a dark time when it looked as if Germany was on the brink of winning WWII.Stefan Mrak, the lead character, starts out as a naïve young man with literary ambitions (he wants to be a playwright and has a pile of rejected scripts). Over the course of the story, Stefan grows up – but not merely in the sense of becoming an adult. He becomes a soldier and an officer, he learns to make decisions that may get people killed (both himself and men under his command), and he learns to guard his tongue and hide his emotions so that he can function as a clandestine agent and avoid arrest – while he’s also trying to find and rescue his wife, Marta, who has disappeared in the maelstrom of German-occupied Prague.
The story is set against the backdrop of WWII London and Prague, and is filled with accurate historical details and brought to life with spot-on characterizations -- an English girl whose job as a dispatch rider brings her into contact with Stefan – and who falls hopelessly in love with him; a venal German sergeant who doesn’t care about the war, but only about feathering his own nest – in part with jewelry taken from concentration camp inmates; a Czech gangster who is active in the black market, but who also provides information about the routines of SS guards protecting Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor of Czechoslovakia; a nightclub singer who once had an affair with Stefan – and is still interested in him; and many more. Even the characters who only have one line of dialog are quirky and original.
Read this book! But don’t start it on a weeknight, because you’ll sit up finishing it and be groggy the next day.
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Tags : Killing the Hangman [James Pattillo] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. March, 1939. Stefan Mrak escorts a planeload of intelligence files from Prague to London. Before he can return,James Pattillo,Killing the Hangman,Rincon Publishing,097975528X,FICTION Thrillers Historical
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Killing the Hangman James Pattillo 9780979755286 Books Reviews
Review of Killing the Hangman by James Pattillo
Listening to Leonard Cohen’s last song, “You Want It Darker,” one is jolted by the line “I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim.” In 1942 the Nazi Regime raged on with its boundless pursuit of murder and mayhem, and in this setting James Pattillo creates a full-bodied story of an everyday man caught up in espionage which pits him against most odds of either success or survival. Pattillo’s work of fiction, Killing the Hangman, bases his story on historical facts then creates characters to bring this thriller of a story into vivid view.
What does it mean to be a moral human in immoral times? The hero, Stefan Mrak, from Czechoslovakia, is an everyday man whose pre-war life plans were simply to write plays. Yet he ends up participating in an international plot to assassinate a high-ranking Nazi officer in Prague. His thoughts, while in the plane leaving England, where he was sent after being pressured into intelligence service, include “He’d expected to be excited; he was going home. He’d expected to be afraid; he was about to parachute into a country controlled by enemies on what was probably a suicide mission. He’d expected to regret volunteering; from the beginning of time, ‘never volunteer’ had been a cardinal rule in every army in the world. He felt all these things in the last week. But he didn’t feel them now. Now — and he hadn’t expected this — he felt like a stone, merely existing without involvement. Being moved somewhere but not by his own agency.”
Clearly Pattillo knows the territory, through research that blends a deep knowledge
of armaments and architecture, cityscapes and national customs, along with the interior landscape of the characters he creates. He drops in flavorful images that
enliven the pages beyond the action itself. Phrases such as, “he stepped into a small foyer and warm air sighed over him,” or, “a busy wind lifted discarded newspapers, which flapped like wounded pigeons.” I loved his main character wondering if Marmite was to eat or comb into his hair. Foreign is foreign on multiple levels.
Zeroing in most of the novel in one place, like a single pin on a massive war map, and a small cadre of characters, gives a heightened sensation to what happened under the wide-angle lens of World War II.
This is a visual and visceral story full of particularly fascinating details that speak
to the author’s wide ranging curiosity as well as his ability to provide a high stakes story that draws the reader right in.
The novel is based on historical facts, meticulously researched. That said, it is a tale of the classic battle of David and Goliath. But this Goliath does not know that a David exists, who is determined to destroy him. Goliath feels invincible, and the story begins. Reinhard Heydrich is 6’4” and an ideal of Hitler's Germanic race. He is also the most evil of Hitler’s henchmen. The unlikely Czech protagonist, the gentle, play-writing Stefan Mrak, a lieutenant in the Czech army in exile in Britain, is soon recruited to be dropped by parachute into the forests near his native Prague, with orders to assassinate Heydrich. The novel turns into a page turning fury of cinematic suspense. Good against Evil. Small versus Large. A mouse, versus a rapacious wolf.
The reader is glued to the pages, he sees the scenes play out in front of him. The dialogue is as good as dialogue in an excellent film, speeding the story along. (This book should be made into a film!) In the descriptions, the reader can feel the change of seasons, smells the rain, the cafes, the beer halls and the acrid odors of a bombed city. But most importantly, Pattillo portrays the lacerating loneliness of a man who cannot reveal himself and his mission.
The minor players are drawn so vividly they seem to jump off the pages, Dunya, a nightclub singer who was once romantically involved with Stefan, Jindra, a member of the underground who can barely hold his life together, Marta, the young wife, who tries to survive as best as possible in this surreal time where everything is upside down.
My congratulations go to Pattillo, who has added an important book to the accounts written about the Nazi period and the horrors it produced. The tone is one of love for his country and for Marta, and the desire to rid the world of a monster. I love the book, and I thank James Pattillo for revealing life in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation.
Karin Finell
Excellent story.
Well done fictional account of an actual event in wartime Prague.
Historically accurate
‘Killing the Hangman’ is really three books in one. It’s a vivid dramatization of actual historical events, it’s an emotionally satisfying love story, and, most importantly, it’s a gripping suspense novel, set in a dark time when it looked as if Germany was on the brink of winning WWII.
Stefan Mrak, the lead character, starts out as a naïve young man with literary ambitions (he wants to be a playwright and has a pile of rejected scripts). Over the course of the story, Stefan grows up – but not merely in the sense of becoming an adult. He becomes a soldier and an officer, he learns to make decisions that may get people killed (both himself and men under his command), and he learns to guard his tongue and hide his emotions so that he can function as a clandestine agent and avoid arrest – while he’s also trying to find and rescue his wife, Marta, who has disappeared in the maelstrom of German-occupied Prague.
The story is set against the backdrop of WWII London and Prague, and is filled with accurate historical details and brought to life with spot-on characterizations -- an English girl whose job as a dispatch rider brings her into contact with Stefan – and who falls hopelessly in love with him; a venal German sergeant who doesn’t care about the war, but only about feathering his own nest – in part with jewelry taken from concentration camp inmates; a Czech gangster who is active in the black market, but who also provides information about the routines of SS guards protecting Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor of Czechoslovakia; a nightclub singer who once had an affair with Stefan – and is still interested in him; and many more. Even the characters who only have one line of dialog are quirky and original.
Read this book! But don’t start it on a weeknight, because you’ll sit up finishing it and be groggy the next day.
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